General says Marine Expeditionary Units needed for crises

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an emotional mea culpa Wednesday to Congress about the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, a Marine general said the military is also to blame because it lacked the resources to respond and prevent the deaths of four Americans.

U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in Benghazi along with two former Navy SEALs turned contract workers — Tyrone Woods of Imperial Beach and Glen Doherty of Encinitas — and information officer Sean Smith, a San Diego native, after highly trained militants assaulted the consulate with gunfire and mortars.

“It is my contention that in Benghazi, military leaders are at fault to some degree,” said Lt. Gen. John Toolan, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force headquartered at Camp Pendleton.

“Because if you look at the challenge and you look at the time lines and you look at what happened, why didn’t we have forces capable of bringing people into Benghazi, put a security cordon around that consulate and pull those four guys out?”

The answer is complicated and involves changes in both the type of threats America faces and its ability to respond, according to military leaders and security analysts.

Military cutbacks dating to the 1990s led to the loss of a Marine Expeditionary Unit assigned to the Mediterranean, which could have easily landed troops in Benghazi using the MV-22 Osprey, Toolan told the San Diego Military Advisory Council Wednesday morning.

The last 12 years at war heightened competition for military resources, increasing constraints in naval shipbuilding and a push to use special operations teams for “middleweight” missions once handled by the Marine Corps, he added.

The Arab Spring that led to the toppling of dictators in Egypt and Libya and a bloody war in Syria also unleashed militants and weapons. And the decline of al-Qaeda and death of Osama bin Laden failed to stop the terrorist movement, which lives on in autonomous franchises across North Africa and the Middle East.

“You can take a look at what happened in Benghazi and you can say that is the ‘new normal.’ And that’s not promising,” Toolan said. “If you look at what’s happened in Libya and other places along the Maghreb, the Levant, what’s happened in Syria ... problems have grown.”

How America should respond to terrorist threats abroad is an ongoing debate. On one end of the spectrum are those who say the United States cannot afford most military interventions and should focus on partnerships with foreign armies and police forces to hunt terrorists.

The CIA’s drone program targeting suspected terrorists in other countries such as Pakistan and Yemen is also highly controversial, because of international sovereignty, the lack of due process for accused terrorists, civilian casualties and the inability to interrogate and glean intelligence from those who are assassinated.

On the other end, some argue for a more robust boots-on-the-ground response, ranging from special operations raids like the one that killed bin Laden to the seaborne force the Marines provide and talk of Army brigades based in an expanding number of foreign countries.

After the Benghazi attack and the more recent hostage crisis in Algeria, where 37 people were killed, including three Americans, some have argued for a reassessment of the U.S. government’s light footprint in Northern Africa and so-called “lead from behind” strategy of relying on foreign militaries.

Dipak Gupta, a political science professor at San Diego State University who has written a book on terrorism, disagrees. “We cannot be heavy-handed, guns ablaze, jumping off the ship at every conflict,” he said.

America cannot afford to respond within a few hours anywhere in the world when a crisis flares, Gupta said.

“You can’t go and put out small fires all over the world, all at the same time. Somebody may say you should know Libya is a volatile place. Well, so is Pakistan, so is Afghanistan, so is Mali. There are physical limitations, resource limitations to what we can actually do.”

Retired Vice Adm. Peter Daly, chief executive of the U.S. Naval Institute, said “clearly in Libya it looked like the administration became very taken with the idea we can do this on a shoestring. In some cases a shoestring is OK. It clearly wasn’t here.”

The heart of the bigger long-term question is, “If you get less, you have to do less,” Daly said. Otherwise, “you will endanger people. You will have mission failure and killed in action like we did in Benghazi. Then longer term, you are taking too much risk with the force itself. That’s a recipe for the force going hollow.”

Toolan argued for a reinvestment in the Marine Expeditionary Unit, the constellation of Marine air and ground forces deployed on Navy ships that has gained additional range with the addition of the MV-22 Osprey. “We are losing more and more of that capability,” Toolan said, but with the Osprey, “they can get in there, get out of there without a problem.”

In March 2011, the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit demonstrated the potential for the tilt-rotor aircraft that flies like a plane but lands like a helicopter. It dispatched an Osprey near Benghazi to rescue a downed Air Force fighter pilot during the civil war that led to the overthrow and death of Muammar Qaddafi.

Also during Operation Unified Protector/Odyssey Dawn, short take-off and vertical landing Harrier jets operating from the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge conducted the first precision airstrikes, and KC-130J planes evacuated noncombatants, Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos reported to the House Armed Services Committee in February 2012.

U.S. Special Operations Command has been pushing deeper into the crisis response mission, “and it really needs to be a team effort. It can’t be them alone. Because they don’t have everything they need in case something really goes bad,” Toolan said.

Fiscal constraints may call for a sea change in how the U.S. projects naval power, perhaps by relying on landing platforms and littoral combat ships for missions once handled by amphibious assault ships, Toolan said.

Otherwise, “the new normal is going to crush us. If we can’t respond quickly to crises throughout that region, we have a problem. ... The worst part of the problem will be U.S. credibility around the world. The people in the Pacific will say 'Holy mackerel, we don’t need the U.S. They obviously can’t even handle North Africa. They’re going to try and handle China?'”